Meditations on the Self: Humour, Blackness, and Textuality in/of The White Boy Shuffle (1996)

This is an-in person event at the Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar Room 208, North House, Toronto, Ontario.

 

There’s something about Paul Beatty’s humour in The White Boy Shuffle (1996) that’s easier to intuit than it is to put into language. It is this characteristic of Shuffle’s comedy that invites readers to question what makes literature “literature.”   With this question in mind, “Meditations on the Self” explores how Beatty guides our reading of Shuffle as a collection of comedic psychological fables. In other words, this presentation reflects on how Beatty uses humour to prompt (or dupe) the reader into acting out the text through the very reading of it. The so-called “reading effect” produced by Beatty’s comedic novel is precisely what opens up a larger conversation about the relationship between “literature” and “psychoanalysis”—as well as the uneasy relationship between psychoanalysis and race. By attempting a close reading of Shuffle’s self-reflexive humour, Jasleen willingly allows herself to fall for Beatty’s running joke on the reader—with the hope of better understanding the significance of The White Boy Shuffle not only as a work of African American literary fiction, but as a work of literary and cultural theory.  

 

Speaker Bio:

Jasleen Singh (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in English. Jasleen’s dissertation seeks to identify the language and categories that will allow us to more fully understand the way humour functions in African American literature. Her research focuses primarily on the novels of Paul Beatty, which Jasleen reads as ideal instances of Black psychoanalysis. Prior to joining the Department of English, Jasleen graduated with Honours in Journalism and English from Carleton University, and completed an MSc in postcolonial literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has reported on racial and economic inequality for radio and print in Ottawa, and has been stationed in Kigali, Rwanda, where she covered breaking news for the TV10 network. In addition to receiving funding from SSHRC and OGS, Jasleen’s doctoral project is funded by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Top Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto.